People often think that web design is a creative process of creating a beautiful website. However, it’s not that simple, and creativity and imagination alone are not enough. To get a really good result, you need to understand how users will think, perceive, and act during their user journey.
UX design (UX — User Experience) is a process that determines what kind of experience a user will have when using a product. UX designers design their products to be useful, simple, and enjoyable to use.
User research and understanding the basic rules of design are essential for any UX designer. To better analyze their audience, specialists often resort to well-known psychological tricks and laws.
We will look at 7 laws of UX design that large companies follow. We also use them in our work.
Jakob’s Law
Jakob Nielsen is a usability expert and head of the Nielsen Norman Group, founded jointly with Donald Norman (former vice president of research at Apple Computer).
The rule is as follows:
Users spend most of their time in other applications. This means that users prefer your application to work in the same way as others they are already familiar with.
In other words, users are so accustomed to certain elements on the website that it is difficult for them to perceive them in a new way. For example, people always know where to find the shopping cart or where the search bar is located.
There is a unified system that users use to automatically read a website: when they visit a page, they quickly find the navigation menu, click on the tab, find the product they want, and place an order.
Therefore, designers need to use traditional templates. The structure and layout of common elements, page navigation — familiar patterns are suitable for all these components. This way, users will not have to deal with a new model of your website.
Miller’s Law
George A. Miller is an American psychologist and one of the founders of cognitive psychology.
The law states that
The average person can only hold 7 ± 2 items in their short-term memory. Therefore, people can remember about seven pieces of information at a time. Otherwise, the brain will be overloaded.
To avoid overwhelming users, designers divide information into groups and subgroups for better perception and memorization. For example, they simplify the menu on the website by moving some sections to a drop-down menu. Or they add hints to the order form to minimize user errors.
Fitts’ Law
Paul Fitts is a psychologist who studied the human motor system. He showed that the time required to move to a target depends on the distance to it, but is inversely proportional to its size.
The law states:
The time to reach a target is determined by the distance to the target and its scale. Fast movements + small targets lead to more errors.
This law helps designers, marketers, and business leaders understand that in order for a user to place an order on a website, they must be able to easily find the control, i.e., the button. Designers often use this law to increase the clickable area of a drop-down menu to minimize the possibility of the user missing it.
Heek’s Law
Heek’s Law (or Heek-Hyman’s Law) is named after the British and American team of psychologists William Edmund Heek and Ray Hyman. In 1952, the pair began studying the relationship between the number of stimuli available and the time it takes a person to respond to any given stimulus. As expected, the more stimuli there are to choose from, the longer it takes the user to decide which one to interact with.
The law states:
The time required to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
You may have observed this phenomenon when you want to buy coffee or pasta in a store and cannot decide. It seems that they are all the same. The same thing happens when choosing a movie: finding the right one takes much longer than watching it.
In web design, a clear example is choosing a delivery city in an online store. In the first version, the designer added capital letters in alphabetical order to the columns so that the user could find the desired city faster. But this is still not very convenient. In the second example, the designer shows the 10 most popular cities, and the rest can be found through the search bar. Much more convenient.
Ockham’s razor
Ockham’s razor is named after the English Franciscan monk and nominalist philosopher William of Ockham.
The law states:
The creation of new concepts, terms, definitions, and entities should be avoided if they are not necessary. The simplest explanations are the best.
This law has gained widespread popularity and become a modern trend. More and more large companies are beginning to cut out and remove unnecessary elements from their logos and corporate identities, reducing them as much as possible and emphasizing what is important to their brand. A brand logo should tell the story of the company, be memorable, and convey its essence. Brands have begun to abandon serifs in fonts en masse, choosing flat graphics and concise colors that do not cause problems when printing. In this way, they cut out the unnecessary, leaving only the essence, which can be conveyed to the consumer more easily and with higher quality.
The law of proximity
The principles of Gestalt psychology were discovered in the first half of the 20th century by researchers who were trying to understand how people visually perceive the world and how they decide whether elements belong to the same group. These principles included the following: proximity, similarity, and completeness.
The law states:
Elements that are close to each other are more likely to be perceived as parts of the same group with similar functionalities and characteristics.
The law of proximity is the most important of the grouping principles and can override competing visual principles such as similarity, color, or shape.
The Restoroff Effect
In 1933, German physician, psychologist, and PhD Hedwig von Restorff conducted a series of experiments at the University of Berlin, during which she discovered a pattern: people remember objects that stand out from a series of similar objects better. This feature of human memory was called the “isolation effect,” better known as the Restorff effect.
It sounds like this:
Among a series of similar elements, it will be easier to remember the one that stands out the most.
In design, for example, an object can be highlighted by color, size, location, frame, shadow, and other visual highlighting techniques. This will make it not only more noticeable but also more memorable.
One example of highlighting in design is the use of so-called motivational triggers or eye-catchers. Here’s how this is implemented on a children’s goods online store website. Here, one of the products in the catalog is highlighted with an eye-stopper indicating a 20% discount. The circle itself is in a noticeable red color and superimposed on the image, making it difficult to miss.
As a result, users are more likely to notice and remember this product in the catalog compared to other products placed nearby.
Conclusion:
User interface design is a responsible task. The laws listed above help us create more effective and successful projects and defend them to clients.
